Ramsey's F Word Series 2 On DVD

Series 2 of Gordon Ramsey's F Word comes out on DVD on March 17 (you can advance order it here), and the flaks are pushing it as totally uncensored. The claim is about 99.99 percent true. I previewed the show, and in the course of the season chef Ramsey utters the eponymous F-Word in every imaginable register and emotional timbre, from Bull-piss fury to a bemused whisper. But there is one bleep in the season. I think he might have called somebody a cocksucker.

The F Word runs on BBC's Channel 4, and it's the best of Ramsey's shows (as intense as Hell's Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares, but deeper and more varied). Ramsey invites a team of amateur chefs -- butchers, society ladies, Emergency hospital techs -- to cook a night's meal in his London restaurant: if the customers don't like a course, they don't pay for it.

That's plenty of fun, but the real heart of the show concerns Ramsey's

projects to investigate the ethical and philosophical aspects of what

we eat. This season he raises two Berkshire pigs in his back yard, with

the help of his darling kids, revealing the full ramifications of our

carnivorous predilections from birth to slaughter. The pigs become

pets, of course, and Ramsey visibly weeps when he finally has to take

them to the abattoir (and so do we, the slaughter is uncensored too).

But he and the kids recover nicely: in the next show they're filmed

making sausage out of Trinny and Susannah's intestines -- those pet

pigs retain their names down to the grilling of their tails.

Along

the way there are segments on factory farming of pigs and veal, on

American lobsters crayfish crowding out the native species in England's watery